Teach me to startle
at the first crow’s caw
echoing overheadto bid farewell
to the bit of snow
along the drivewayto exult in wonder
every time
a schoolbus passesin return I offer
a word for every thing
in the wide world
DIY suns
Then one of us reached
to where a ruined fruit had fallen,
its heavy coat split and the bitter marrow
bared, then flung it skywards, a little sun
spinning above the skinny elbows of the trees.
On the Nature of Things
“Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death, we humans live in an unwalled city.” ~ Epicurus
When the radio alarm kicks on at 7:15,
there’s an NPR interview with a writer
who’s talking about how the world
became modern— Still blurry with sleep,
I listen to a few anecdotes about burning libraries,
then some talk about the Renaissance; and of one
Poggio Bracciolini, secretary to several popes,
who found a copy of Lucretius’ On the Nature
of Things in a German monastery— which
everyone thought had been all but lost for the last
thousand plus years. This is the same Lucretius
who wrote about Epicurus, not to be confused
with the website Epicurious (“for people who love
to eat”), where on Thursday the featured recipe
was Turkey Meatballs with Cranberries and Sage.
According to the writer being interviewed,
Lucretius’ text (really a paraphrase of Epicurus)
offered readers a view of a world where the most
important human endeavor was the avoidance
of pain. The world itself was made of wobbly
atoms that jiggled and swerved through space,
sometimes colliding with each other to produce
other complex forms of matter, including humans.
In this old-new world, there are no gods, there is
no afterlife, no heaven or hell: and thus the good
philosopher and poet advise that the sager path
is the enjoyment of life and the relishing of its
pleasures. No need to fear death, as when we die,
our atoms will fizz into the ether and our selves,
as we know them now, will vanish. Why not walk
outside to the porch with a coffee mug in hand,
sit in a chair and set your feet upon the railing?
Bring a saucer of buttered toast spread with some
thick-cut marmalade or a trickle of honey, a book,
some poetry. Enjoy the pearly light while it lasts,
and the quiet: before the day and its many
distractions lays siege to whatever little rim
of pleasure you’ve drawn around this moment.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
About the new look
Visitors to Via Negativa in the last few hours may have noticed some differences. I’m experimenting with a new theme (that’s the design template, for you non-WordPressers) which, though very similar to the old theme in looks, differs substantially under the hood. If you use an iPad, netbook, Kindle, iPhone, Android, or other small-screened computer-like thing, you should find that the site scales down without making you scroll horizontally. I can only simulate the effect by shrinking the window on my desktop, but here’s what happens: the sidebar content shifts down below the main content, and more impressively, the header image and all other images and videos shrink proportionally. Impressive, eh? This is called responsive design, and it is a step beyond the flexible designs of yesteryear, which tended to result in overlapping or squashed images (which is why I always went for fixed-width themes). I’d be interested in any and all feedback on this from those of you who actually browse the web on these newfangled mobile devices.
In other news, for those who missed my note on Facebook this morning, the photoblog is back at the old address with a new name, Woodrat photohaiku, and a new photo to celebrate. I decided to move it to WordPress.com, which means that the four main sites on the Via Negativa network are all back online, split between three different webhosts. Never again will I put all my eggs in one basket.
I also feel I’m a lot closer to diagnosing and thus solving the problems that caused me to get shut down repeatedly at my old hosting company, thanks to the excellent documentation at Dreamhost, where Via Negativa now resides. Turns out that even with top-of-the-line page-caching and spam-stopping plugins, a blizzard of comment and trackback spam can still cause CPU usage to go through the roof, because every time someone (or some bot) enters a comment, it refreshes the cache. I don’t know if this was the whole of my problem, but it certainly might explain those mysterious CPU spikes at 2:00 in the morning. So I’ve turned off all trackbacks, turned off comments on posts older than one month (which really pains me), and am experimenting with new plugins that cache things differently.
The funny thing is, I almost miss those 1.8 million spam comments that had accumulated in Via Negativa’s old database. I had always felt a perverse sense of accomplishment seeing the numbers mount on my dashboard, figuring that since Aksimet caught 99.9% of them, they were a harmless, occasionally amusing annoyance. If only I’d known.
Sorry for all the WordPress-related stuff here lately, by the way, but I don’t want you all to think that I’ve been idle! The truth is, I was mulling over switching to a responsive design a week ago, just before disaster struck, so making these changes makes me feel as if a week of poor sleeping and flailing around like a weak swimmer in a sea of code has been redeemed.
Landscape, with Traces of Prior Events
What of the milk they nuzzled at birth,
and prior to that, what of water and blood?
What of the debris-spattered windshield,
the tunnel wide enough for only one?
What of the minerals gummed with salt and mud,
nourishing dark mixed of earth and flint?
What of the aster and the amaranth, then tiny buds
of forget-me-nots stripped from the field?
What of the year’s deepening light pooled in
the eyelids, a glaze the shade of pomegranates?
And what of the flanks of animals stepping through winter
wheat; then shadows of antlers crossed with the honeylocust’s?
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Counterpoints
The motet is a musical piece for several voices, where independent melodies may be seen to alternate with contrapuntal passages; dating from the 13th century, its name derives from the Latin movere, (“to move”), especially in its description of the movement of different voices against each other; or from a Latinized version of the Old French mot, “word” or “verbal utterance.”
The year dwindles down in earnest, the swirl of
many voices decanting heat and timbre:
notes that move, fevered brass to diminuendo.
We hear them beating against the sky’s clear blue,
dark flecks like carets, bent to their patterned flight.
They’ll find their way to some other page, where wind
combines with other kinds of weather. Don’t rue
too deeply their disappearance; nor the fickle
hue of things steeped in the sun— that russet fruit
whose cheek has turned to blue; that gold persimmon,
its bitter juices puckering on your tongue.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Back
Yes, Via Negativa is back, thanks to these folks. Man, I love the WordPress community. Splitting my WordPress export file into small enough pieces to import allows me to start anew with a fresh installation, which is what I most wanted to do.
Not all functionality is back yet. For example, I’m trying a new audio player for the podcast which should display on mobile devices (it uses HTML5 with fallback to Flash in browsers that don’t support it), and I need to go through and stick the code in each episode. I need to rebuild a links page, and decide how to do Smorgasblog. I seem to have lost all those posts in the move, so this would be a good time to start over with a new system, maybe. I am still not ruling out a move to the reservation, but so far this web host seems considerably less Wild West than my last one. I’m impressed by their extensive documentation on everything, and their apparently more flexible and tolerant attitude toward sites that run too hot. Well, we’ll see about that.
I have lost the last three weeks of comments, which included, among other things, this gem by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, in response to my post “After Dark“:
I’d arrive at rehearsals bearing my cicada-moulted shell in a tissue-lined matchbox. (Who needs a Stradivarius? I travel light!) There would be but a single note got from it before it crumpled in exhaustion, but that would be a note of such supernatural perfection coming at the climax of the concert, that thereafter audiences would just file silently away, knowing that there would never be anything as beautiful in their lives again. Sigh.
(Fortunately, I subscribe to the comments feed, so I still have the texts of all your lovely comments. But I’m not quite dedicated enough to go import them all by hand, which would include putting in the proper email and web address for each.)
Aria
I’ve turned the bird of my inmost longings
loose into the ether. It used to sit in a cage
of sinew and leather, its red singing
voice muffled beneath the hum
and chirr of turning gears. It visited
all the dreams I could no longer
remember— How did I know?
I knew, because it left the smallest
of teardrop shapes, tiny salt
chandeliers encrusted on the pillow.
At noon, its unsung arias begged
to be pried open: they swelled,
round-hipped and brown, like figs,
ripe; like rosewood hips of a cello.
They begged to be pried open,
marbled to liquid in a throat drenched
by sun. And so I let it be. I’ll keep
the green branch on which it roosts,
should it return. I’ll learn to live on
this door’s swinging hinge,
sustain on flimsy hope. Because I
love it so, I’ll let it take its leave of me.
—Luisa A. Igloria
11 10 2011
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Paul Henry on time travel
So we’ve moved out of the years.
I am finally back upstream
and, but for their holiday grins
on every bookcase, the boys
were never born, it was a dream.
Holding pattern
A wise blogging friend advised me today to stop running myself ragged trying to restore everything at once, and take as much time as I need to think through the gnarly problem of what to do with Via Negativa long-term. Moving Poems and The Morning Porch are back up on a new host, Luisa is continuing her daily poems in response to my porch posts (scroll down to see her three most recent), and I have this beachhead here until I sort things out.
Another blogger I admire recently migrated her site off of cheap shared web hosting and onto WordPress.com (which is about the same annual cost once you get the necessary upgrades), and has urged me to do the same. I’m very tempted. Via Negativa’s database is so bloated, I can’t even upload it here without trying to learn something called SSH. But even if I manage that, I have no guarantee that I won’t get kicked off this server, too, for exceeding CPU limits. This is a problem on all shared web hosting arrangements, from what I gather. Via Negativa has simply gotten too big for this environment, I think, and it’s time to either pay hundreds of dollars a year for VPS (a virtual private server — the next step up), or learn Drupal and attempt to export this beast to that more sturdily built content management system. Both options are way beyond my current technical abilites. At WordPess.com, by contrast, I’d never again have to worry about getting shut down for excessive CPU usage or crashing because of a traffic spike. Through some minor miracle I managed to import almost all VN posts to a nonce site there today, which almost made up my mind for me. But it would mean significant changes and sacrifices: most incoming links will be broken because of a slightly different permalink structure; the series will no longer work as such since they don’t support that taxonomy there (I would probably just use tags); I won’t have a fancy podcasting plugin and will have to content myself with a simple audio player for the Woodrat podcast; etc. And I will miss tinkering with the controls and pretending I really understand what makes it all fly.